Yes, and:
- skills to grow things
- community of people you have been giving extra zucchinis to
- skills to prepare meals using the things that you grow
So people who want to kill you for having to take all those zucchinis they didn’t want
Each zucchini has a note carved into it that says that if I do not send at least five zucchinis to people in my friends list then the zucchini ghost will come and fill my fridge with zucchinis and I don’t want that
My garden spits out three things en masse. Crazy hot jalapeños, lime, and mint. When the world collapses, I’m gonna mojito/spicy marg my way out.
This is unironically me. I sadly did the math on how long we can survive on my vegetable garden. Spoiler: not long!
I consider myself a “prepper” I don’t prep for the apocalypse but for “next Tuesday” if we have a shelter in place, or some large utility failure, a big earthquake or volcano so I spend time in prepper spaces. The amount of people who are not prepper and genuinely believe they can garden their way to survival is SO high. When we look at places around the world dealing with long term hardships no one is surviving off their personal garden. Farming at scale exists for a reason, growing food is extremely labor, time and resource intensive, unless you’re doing it at scale you’re like net negative in calories for what you’re putting in versus what you’re getting out. Farming livestock that can live off the land like goats or chickens would be more successful but that also takes a good amount of time and labor and the willingness to kill the animals you’ve raised and know how to safely process them.
Anyone who’s worried about needing to provide for themselves in times of extreme hardship should do the research and start getting ready now, don’t worry about gardening, figure out how to get and store long term self stable foods and potable water and anything fresh is just a supplement.
You’ll have to trade with people who have more or other things. I’d wager things like salt, sugar, baking powder, yeast , spices, nails, screws, hand tools, will be in high demand come a large-scale long-term collapse.
I mean there was a Silk Road for a reason.
Very true, I love gardening, but its very hard to eke out a meaningful calorie count.
At best it’s a supplement. I grow beans (lol) at my place because they really seem to thrive and grow practically like weeds. Beans freeze really well and can be dehydrated.
I bought a large dehydrator to compliment my dry goods food storage, which is up to about 8 months worth of dry goods, 3 months of tinned. I like to buy fruit at wholesale prices when it’s in season at the farms near me, and make fruit leather, and I make my own biltong. But I also get bags of frozen veg and dehydrate these right from the bag. They pack down much smaller than frozen and are very easy to do. I also have a bunch of citrus trees for vitamin C and easy sugars.
Very true, I love gardening, but its very hard to eke out a meaningful calorie count.
Potatoes.
Until you get blight, anyway, then you’re fucked.
Actually this is true. I grew potatoes once, in big tubs, and ended up with like 30kg from 1 square metre. I still have some boiled and frozen in my freezer
Yeah they produce insanely well.
Potatoes for calories / nutrients + beans for protein / nutrients + (I havent tried this yet but) high-producing grain like Amaranth for calories seems the best combo, but you’ll still need community to survive no doubt
I call myself an aspiring farmer. I’ve been at it for about 12 years. I’ve learned a lot, I’ve lost a lot, for most of that I didn’t have much land and had to get creative. Now we’re in a decent spot with some good land and soil, I grow most of the fruits and vegetables that we eat, probably 70-80%, and raise quail for the eggs which we have a wild surplus of.
It’s a fucking fuckton of work and still I think if SHTF we would struggle big time. Most of what we do is pretty self sufficient, but we still rely on the grocery store for so many ingredients and products. I don’t have enough space to grow enough wheat to mill into flour to make bread, nor do I really want to. Also all it would really take is our water supply to be cut and we’d be done for.
I do think it’s a good skill to have though. And if I had the money fuck off I’d quit my day job in a heartbeat and buy more land to farm.
I think that last part is key, it’s a good skill to have. It’s easy to think it’ll be everyone on their own when the apocalypse happens, but people generally want to work together if it means better chances of survival.
It’s hard to imagine there wouldn’t be tribes of people popping up across the wasteland
Our natural state is to exist in collective communities. It is only capitalism that has atomized us into individuals competing against everyone else.
no one is going to make it on their own. community effort is the only way survival is gonna happen.
Spot on. I don’t think I alone could survive an apocalypse, but I think I could be an asset to a community of people who can.
Options for the end of the world:
- Learn to farm and become self sufficient
- Learn to shoot a gun and map out where all the farmers are
Nice version of number 2) offer your services to protect them from raiders and get paid in food
That’s just being a raider with good PR.
- Beef Jerky and Canned Beans.
The problems will definitely be showing up next year. In order for there to be enough fertilizer produced by this fall time (for crops produced in the southern hemisphere) as well as next year (for the northern hemisphere), the Strait of Hormuz would have needed to have reached 100% per-war traffic by July 1st.
It has barely reached 33%.
This means that supplies for fertilizer manufacturing is now months behind schedule, and fertilizer supply for farmers is going to be hellishly expensive through next year. Many farmers may have to try to grow their crops without any fertilizer, leading to potentially severe food shortages worldwide-wide.
The time to have learned how to grow your own food - to ramp up experience over many years - was a decade ago. My wife and I started in the mid 2010s, and are only now hitting our stride with about 230m² (≈2,500ft²) of our yard under direct cultivation, and plans to rehabilitate the other 140m² (≈1,500ft²) into equally quality soil via several metric tonnes of horse manure and soil sifting to remove the copious rocks and boulders.
It takes a shitton of work to build up a good garden that requires minimal work to start up every spring. But with that original section, we just have to drop seeds directly into the soil and add straw (Ruth Stout method) once the seedlings are up to suppress weeds and hold in moisture. The spring prep work for just that section has dropped by almost 80% over the last five years.
How come fertilizer is routed through the Strait of Hormuz? I can’t think of a reason why it would need petroleum to be made
Literally every single production chain on the planet uses petrochemicals at some point in the process.
The foundation of the vast majority of agricultural fertilizer is urea and DAP, and the gulf countries make about 40% of the world’s supply with Iran being the single largest exporter in the world.
Sulphur is also a critical phosphate production, and most sulphur these days comes from petrochemical refinement.
It doesn’t take much land to be self sufficient in vegetables if you are willing to limit your vegetable choices to your climate and to preserve them. However vegetables are the by far easiest part of being self sufficient. Getting your carbs and your proteins is far harder. Say you eat around 300g of grain per day. Then you would need about 219 square meters of grain if you have a typical organic yield. Replace your carbs with potato and maybe you can reduce that by 50%, but then you run into the risk of potato harvest failing, which they often do in organic systems. For proteins you would either have to have animals plus area to grow their feed, or grow a huge area on par with the grains to get enough shelling beans to meet your protein needs. But vegetables? Just a dozen or two square meters should be enough.
Assuming you’re able to produce enough for the off season and have a method to store said food.
It’s called “subsistence farming” and is a crapload of work.
However vegetables are the by far easiest part of being self sufficient. Getting your carbs and your proteins is far harder.
Nervous pet noises
can keep chickens for eggs for protein
And what will the chickens eat? You still have to grow their feed. Buying feed from the feed store is not self-sufficiency
I have quail and I grow/make my own feed + a little meal worm setup. Although when I run out of my current supply I plan on buying from the feed store in town. I don’t think it saves me any money once everything is factored in and it’s a good bit of extra work that could go towards stuff I actually want to eat.
food waste, and theyll forage a bit too
breadfruit tree for carbs
I’m so sick of dummies thinking they are going to survive the collapse of society or prevent it buy planting a vegetable garden.
And yet I see someone posting their anxiety cope on here once a week, at least. Asking for advice how to become a homesteader on their 1/4 acre lot in a city/suburb. They write a 1000 word essay on the topic, asking of r ‘advice’ how to learn a lifetime of veggie growing experience into a few sentences so that they can be coming ‘self sufficient’.
Grow plants if you want, for fun. But stop with the prepper bullshit. Stop being an paranoid egotistical idiot. If society collapses, you are fucked and there is shit you can do about it. You are not the protagonist of a apocalyptic movie, sorry to inform you. You are an extra whose only purpose in the story is to die or already be dead in the background of the shot.
Yep not to mention that if you manage to have a good garden when SHTF you’re just the first target for the raiders.
There is an excellent, practical book about surviving economic collapse by someone who went through it in Argentina.
And I honestly would not want to live in a world where there is such instability. Even before electricity, one needed a stable community to thrive. Every time I watch an apocalyptic movie, I always think about how stressful and exhausting it would be to be a survivor, and hope to be one of the first to die. Even if things get better again, I will most likely never experience the levels of comfort I have become accustomed to within my lifetime. No thanks.
I was able to grow a lotta stuff in just a couple of garden beds on my roof. Sure, my back probably hates me for carrying all that dirt up two flights of stairs. But I have herbs and veggies aplenty. Haven’t even covered 20% of the roof yet.
Wet dirt can have a lot of weight. You may want to verify the roof can handle it.
It was made to withstand a whole 'nother floor, which never got built. It can handle a foot of dirt.
I’ve got two of those survival food buckets from Costco, so that’s about how long I will last after the apocalypse, before I start selling myself to stronger people who will protect me.
Hey
We all know someone like this!
I feel seen
I looked into what it would take for me to grow tomatoes here in NM, and decided against it.
Yeah good luck outsmarting the squirrels on the tomatoes…
build a cage. if you leave a small flap on top it doubles as a trap and you can have “free” protein.
